With the vote on Britain’s future in the EU just a month away, Defra secretary Liz Truss has issued her latest warning about the harm leaving the union would do to food exporters. This week, the environment secretary was in Devon, meeting farmers at the Devon County Show, and used the opportunity to state that Britain’s beef industry would be under threat if the country votes to cede from the EU in June.

Ahead of the Devon County Show, Truss highlighted that 93% of Britain’s beef exports (worth £320million) were destined for other EU states in 2015, and said a vote to exit could cost beef farmers millions of pounds. She also highlighted the dependence of the South-West as a whole on trade with EU states, pointing out that 75 per cent of all food and drink exports from the region, worth £420m, went to EU countries.

Echoing warnings issued on visits to Scotland, Northern Ireland, Somerset and most recently Cumbria in recent weeks, Truss told farmers they could face crippling tariffs to sell their goods to Europe and a ‘red tape’ “double whammy” of different rules around inspections and labelling to sell abroad and at home – two sets of regulations, rather than one.

Around a third of Britain’s beef exports are destined for Ireland, with the Netherlands and France the next biggest buyers. The government’s warning to farmers in Northern Ireland also touched on the barriers to trade across the border with the Republic in the case of a Brexit vote.

Truss said, “Devon is home to more than a third of all the beef farms in the South West, and its farmers benefit from having the world’s largest single market of half a billion customers on their doorstep, buying 93 per cent of our beef exports.

“This European market is vital not just for Devon’s farmers, who are rearing top-quality beef cattle, but for the county’s huge food manufacturing sector, which creates even more local jobs. Leaving the EU is a leap in the dark which would put these jobs at risk and threaten the livelihoods of the region’s 60,000-plus agricultural workers. Farmers in Devon and across the UK, are safer, stronger and better off as part of a reformed EU.”

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